Stevrd Labs/experiments: Improving Hormones And Health Through Diet, Lifestyle, Supplements

[Blossom]

I’m glad you’re doing well Steve and have found a way of eating that works for you and your family. It’s so important to be able to enjoy meals with family in my opinion!

 

[stevrd]

I’m glad you’re doing well Steve and have found a way of eating that works for you and your family. It’s so important to be able to enjoy meals with family in my opinion!

Thank you @Blossom . Indeed it is advantageous to enjoy meals in the company of others. I eat PUFA-laden meals when I visit in-laws and family for the holidays. No regrets there. What's life if we can't enjoy eating with others? A little bad food is nothing in the broad scheme of things.

Hopefully my health continues to improve with this way of eating. One thing that Peat said that stuck with me is that whenever he tells people to stop using supplements, their health improves. I can relate to this as well. Little by little I am removing them and seem to be benefiting. Some seem necessary in this day in age, like vitamin E and glycine. These two IMO are just protective given our food environment, being high in PUFA and low in collagen.

 

[managing]

Ok, when one says LPS found in food, I just presume they are being lazy and/or colloquial. I presumed that you were when you said that. All here know that the focus is on LPS created as microbial metabolites in the gut. LPS found in food may be a concern with, for example, fermented foods, but the PRIMARY focus is microbial metabolites. Its certainly RP's primary focus. His other focus is on foods that increase gut permeability, but that relates directly to neither microbial metabolites nor food LPS content.

As for Volek's work, it is contradictory results that have not be replicated. Meanwhile, the vast body of research achieves exactly the opposite result. In such a case, one tries to replicate or find a flaw in the research. Peat found a very plausible flaw. He may or may not have been speculating, but you don't "confront" somebody with research like this. He was dismissive for a reason. Does that mean Volek's work is definitively wrong? No. But no reasonable scientist will take it seriously . . . until and unless it is replicated.

I am entirely open to the notion that RP can be wrong about some things, but this doesn't seem to be an example. That doesn't make RP immune to challenge. But Volek's work (alone) is not a challenge. Its an outlier. Even outliers can be correct sometimes. But to randomly choose to believe an outlier w/o further inquiry is a willful act, not a rational one.

As for exercise, like I said there is a VAST distance between brisk walking and marathon running. The Maffetone Method, for example, is used by many, including, wait for it, distance runners! I can't tell whether you are getting hung up on "breathless" which could mean anything, or intentionally creating a straw man.

 

[stevrd]

Ok, when one says LPS found in food, I just presume they are being lazy and/or colloquial. I presumed that you were when you said that. All here know that the focus is on LPS created as microbial metabolites in the gut. LPS found in food may be a concern with, for example, fermented foods, but the PRIMARY focus is microbial metabolites. Its certainly RP's primary focus. His other focus is on foods that increase gut permeability, but that relates directly to neither microbial metabolites nor food LPS content.

As for Volek's work, it is contradictory results that have not be replicated. Meanwhile, the vast body of research achieves exactly the opposite result. In such a case, one tries to replicate or find a flaw in the research. Peat found a very plausible flaw. He may or may not have been speculating, but you don't "confront" somebody with research like this. He was dismissive for a reason. Does that mean Volek's work is definitively wrong? No. But no reasonable scientist will take it seriously . . . until and unless it is replicated.

I am entirely open to the notion that RP can be wrong about some things, but this doesn't seem to be an example. That doesn't make RP immune to challenge. But Volek's work (alone) is not a challenge. Its an outlier. Even outliers can be correct sometimes. But to randomly choose to believe an outlier w/o further inquiry is a willful act, not a rational one.

As for exercise, like I said there is a VAST distance between brisk walking and marathon running. The Maffetone Method, for example, is used by many, including, wait for it, distance runners! I can't tell whether you are getting hung up on "breathless" which could mean anything, or intentionally creating a straw man.

There is nothing to get hung up on when Peat says "breathless." Is he not referring to getting out of breath? If he is referring to getting out of breath, this suggests that he feels hyperventilation is undesirable. He has warned against exercising to the point of hyperventilation many times. This is nothing new. I'm not suggesting that hyperventilation is a good thing, but for gosh sake if somebody wants to achieve higher echelons of physicality, there might just be some times where he or she will need to go through transient periods of hyperventilation. Unless you believe that all stress should be avoided, what is wrong with this? Am I saying that chronic hyperventilation is good? Far from it.

As for the difference between brisk walking and marathon running, I get your point. So what? I'm not arguing with you.

As for Volek's work, I'm not sure I'm following you. Are you arguing for or against it? It's my understanding that Peat cites Volek's work for his argument against starch.

I think you shouldn't presume anything about anybody without first clarifying. You presumed I was being lazy, just as you presume that "All here know that the focus is on LPS created as microbial metabolites in the gut." One could say MOST know, but there are people who have misinterpreted Peat to think that LPS is something one eats.

 

[managing]

There is nothing to get hung up on when Peat says "breathless." Is he not referring to getting out of breath? If he is referring to getting out of breath, this suggests that he feels hyperventilation is undesirable. He has warned against exercising to the point of hyperventilation many times. This is nothing new. I'm not suggesting that hyperventilation is a good thing, but for gosh sake if somebody wants to achieve higher echelons of physicality, there might just be some times where he or she will need to go through transient periods of hyperventilation. Unless you believe that all stress should be avoided, what is wrong with this? Am I saying that chronic hyperventilation is good? Far from it.

As for the difference between brisk walking and marathon running, I get your point. So what? I'm not arguing with you.

As for Volek's work, I'm not sure I'm following you. Are you arguing for or against it? It's my understanding that Peat cites Volek's work for his argument against starch.

I think you shouldn't presume anything about anybody without first clarifying. You presumed I was being lazy, just as you presume that "All here know that the focus is on LPS created as microbial metabolites in the gut." One could say MOST know, but there are people who have misinterpreted Peat to think that LPS is something one eats.

My apologies if you took that personal. A lot of language and reference is "lazy". I was being lazy when I took your reference to mean microbial metabolites. I am more make a distinction between casual language and the kind of careful use of language where one would make a distinction.

Anyway, yes, on Volek, Peat has referenced his work. The specific point you reference, about high fat cream either enabling or causing more LPS to cross into the bloodstream is what I am singling out as an outlier. You said Peat has been "confronted" with it. I find that to be a gross overstatement. He dismissed it out of hand and, in my previous post I explained why that was a reasonable thing to do. You can't be "confronted" with an outlier.

As for "breathless", if breathless means hyperventilating to you, that's fine. I don't know any trainers who argue that one should train to that point point, and most caution specifically against it. There is a lot of cardiovascular capacity to be built w/o hyperventilating.

Interestingly, I just looked up the definition of hyperventilation out of curiosity. It appears to be defined simply by breathing out less CO2 than O2 breathed in. I would not have defined it that way and I don't think most would. I've never taken RP to mean that either. I've always taken him to mean extreme breathlessness. The kind where you have to stop your activity and catch your breath. The "I can't take anymore" kind of breathlessness. It might be tempting to think that he maintains the more technical notion as a scientist. OTOH, his mission is to educate non-scientists, and his endorsement of the Maffetone method seems more consistent with this latter.

I also think his opposition to running and other extreme forms of endurance training have to do more with glycogen depletion and stress hormones (and the corresponding metabolic suppression) than with breathlessness per se. High level endurance athletes rarely experience anything that could truly be called "breathless".

But even this sort of training has responded to the glycogen/stress puzzle. I don't think the response (guzzle sugar, vitamins, and stimulants mid event) is generally an adequate response, but at least shows a burgeoning awareness of the problem.

Still, I think there is plenty of "RP approved" physical activity between a brisk walk and a marathon (which was my point).

 

[stevrd]

My apologies if you took that personal. A lot of language and reference is "lazy". I was being lazy when I took your reference to mean microbial metabolites. I am more make a distinction between casual language and the kind of careful use of language where one would make a distinction.

Anyway, yes, on Volek, Peat has referenced his work. The specific point you reference, about high fat cream either enabling or causing more LPS to cross into the bloodstream is what I am singling out as an outlier. You said Peat has been "confronted" with it. I find that to be a gross overstatement. He dismissed it out of hand and, in my previous post I explained why that was a reasonable thing to do. You can't be "confronted" with an outlier.

As for "breathless", if breathless means hyperventilating to you, that's fine. I don't know any trainers who argue that one should train to that point point, and most caution specifically against it. There is a lot of cardiovascular capacity to be built w/o hyperventilating.

Interestingly, I just looked up the definition of hyperventilation out of curiosity. It appears to be defined simply by breathing out less CO2 than O2 breathed in. I would not have defined it that way and I don't think most would. I've never taken RP to mean that either. I've always taken him to mean extreme breathlessness. The kind where you have to stop your activity and catch your breath. The "I can't take anymore" kind of breathlessness. It might be tempting to think that he maintains the more technical notion as a scientist. OTOH, his mission is to educate non-scientists, and his endorsement of the Maffetone method seems more consistent with this latter.

I also think his opposition to running and other extreme forms of endurance training have to do more with glycogen depletion and stress hormones (and the corresponding metabolic suppression) than with breathlessness per se. High level endurance athletes rarely experience anything that could truly be called "breathless".

But even this sort of training has responded to the glycogen/stress puzzle. I don't think the response (guzzle sugar, vitamins, and stimulants mid event) is generally an adequate response, but at least shows a burgeoning awareness of the problem.

Still, I think there is plenty of "RP approved" physical activity between a brisk walk and a marathon (which was my point).

Well it seems that we are in agreement. Thanks for clarifying your views. I agree that written words get taken out of context. I'm sorry if I came off that way. I took what you wrote as an indirect ad-hominem.

Don't you mean MORE CO2 breathed out? Hyperventilation is simply the loss of partial pressure of CO2 in the blood, leading to respiratory alkalosis. You can have mild respiratory alkalosis and not be ready to faint like if you force hyperventilate. When I refer to it being transiently desirable, I'm talking about a very mild form of hyperventilation leading to only a mild CO2 debt, just very deep breathing. Anything that causes your respiratory rate to increase (breath faster) will do this, and you are more likely to lose more CO2. Sprinting a 100m does this. All out sprinting is stressful. But it is a transient stress that can allow you to reach higher levels.

If you want to get good at sprints, you train at less than your maximum potential and build up to higher levels in weekly cycles. You don't sprint at 100% every day. This is a recipe to fry your CNS, and then you will not only plateau, you will likely regress. Strength training is the same way. The best way to train for strength is to have the bulk of your training cycles in the 70% range, give or take, well under what could be considered "heavy" and then a small amount of training in the 85%+ range. If you train at 85+% all the time, then as power lifters say, you are simply "testing your strength, not building it."

So all I am arguing is that one does need to train at high intensities SOMETIMES, in order to have an adaptive response and improve. And in training at high intensities, one may breathe fast/ heavy and cause excess lactate build-up. Most trainees never train intensely enough to see good progress, as evidenced by 90% of people you see in the gym. Other trainees go overboard and train with high intensity all the time, and either end up burnt out or injured. Only the genetic outliers survive. This was essentially how bulgarian training was formed, and why most people can't do it.

BTW, hyperventilation does not need to be extreme hyperventilation to be dangerous, people with COPD hyperventilate so subtly that it's barely noticeable, however they have chronic respiratory alkalosis. I work with people with COPD on a daily basis so I know first hand. It's not very obvious, and you often have to pay close attention to notice it. Obviously this is different than transient hyperventilation, and I'm not saying this to prove a point, but to expound on the fact that you don't need to be breathing so fast that you are to the point of fainting (i.e. the usual perception of what hyperventilation is) to be hyperventilating.

I still stand by my point that I don't think Ray emphasizes the benefits of transient stress enough. He talks about large muscles being important for health and survivability, but in order to build large muscles one needs to perform eccentric exercise. From a practicality standpoint, one can't build large muscles by "moving some light dumbbells very fast," or by "cycling up a hill and coasting down." Most research involves real-world resistance training, which involve eccentric movement, and anything that goes against this is as you would say, "an outlier." And as you pointed out, we don't use outliers to prove a theory.

Moving back to volek, I completely apologize, I did not mean volek, I meant volkheimer. I went back and dug up what I read about persorption of starch. It's not Volek, it's Volkheimer. I have been reading articles by Volek recently, so I simply confused the two. I have not actually read an article by Volek where he writes about gut permeability. Did you come across this? I'd be interested.

Anyway here is info regarding Volkheimer and starch persorption:
THE PHENOMENON OF PERSORPTION: PERSORPTION, DISSEMINATION, AND ELIMINATION OF MICROPARTICLES – Functional Performance Systems (FPS)

I find it important to read Volkheimer's work, because this is where Peat forms the basis of his arguments. I've read that there is gut persorption of many other foods, for example berries and other fruit cause persorption as well. So it's not just exclusively starch. I'll have to dig up the research that shows blueberries and other foods cause persorption. The authors basically stated that persorption is not a bad thing and that it's a normal process and helps the body become more resilient.

To clarify another point, my citation of sources regarding saturated fat and glucose with increased LPS was just to elaborate a point that other foods increase LPS in the bloodstream, not starch alone. Ray doesn't really discuss this much in his articles, but it's important to point out because there are complex mechanistic reasons why this happens. Those that promulgate that saturated fat is toxic use this link to suggest that eating saturated fat is bad for us, but a close examination reveals that the reason long-chain SFAs increase LPS is due to the transport of chylomicrons for long chain fats. The LPS increases to the degree of chain length, and doesn't happen in any appreciable amount in short and medium chain fatty acids. What I am saying is, just because some saturated fats increase LPS, doesn't mean saturated fat should be avoided. I also would further this by saying it would warrant further investigation into the starch and LPS link. I'm not convinced that starch increasing LPS is inherently a bad thing. And I don't believe there is enough research to convict starch just yet. If you know of any, please share it.

 

[stevrd]

Volkheimer found that mice fed raw starch aged at an abnormally fast rate, and when he dissected the starch-fed mice, he found a multitude of blocked arterioles in every organ, each of which caused the death of the cells that depended on the blood supplied by that arteriole. It isn’t hard to see how this would affect the functions of organs such as the brain and heart, even without considering the immunological and other implications….”

This quote by Peat is interesting. Key words are "raw starch." That raw starch is destructive and causes an increase in endotoxin production is not unreasonable. There is a strong case to be made by this. And I think that this is where many misinterpret him. Peat has said that all starch should be very well cooked and it becomes easier to digest. Also, he's said adding fat to it improves it's digestibility. Here is him saying you can eat hundreds of grams of carbs a day from starch if digestion is good. So this is very person specific.



My main argument all along is that just because somebody read a quote by Peat saying to avoid starch, doesn't mean he should. In some people, starch should be avoided, but I think these cases are much more rare than one would believe if he/she spent considerable time reading this forum.

 

[stevrd]

Below something I save from reading somebody critique Peat years ago. I saved it to my email because I had thought it was a fresh perspective. A scientist is always trying to prove a theory wrong, even if he/she is emotionally attached to it. The reason for this is because proving yourself wrong leads to learning and growth. Fear of being proven wrong is simply a character flaw and has no place in science. Whether you choose to believe what is written below is up to you, but I wanted to share it for good food for thought.



I researched this awhile back and thought I would share my notes, in case this actually were to concern anybody…
Volkheimer used 200g of potato starch to cause embolisms in his subjects. Think about that for a moment. That’s an incredibly large dose of starch granules. Even people who eat raw potato starch—for the resistant starch—rarely consume more than 40-50g per day. On the PHD, it would be a challenge to eat more than 8-12g of starch granules in a day from food.
Volkheimer believed that persorption was some kind of flaw in the gut that allowed starch granules to leak through. And if starch granules that were larger than a red blood cell (6-8 microns in diameter) could get stuck in the blood vessels and cause blockages and embolisms. However, it’s highly unlikely that the lymph and blood vessels are not prepared to handle such intrusions—for instance, it’s well recognized that the liver is specifically designed to filter such particles from the blood.
If we are going to worry about starch granules—which are often larger than the diameter of a red blood cell—then we must also worry about anything else that fits this criteria:
Activated charcoal, has a particle size range of 1-150 microns, and seems to have the ability to detoxify the blood.
Carrots have a starch granule size of 4-26 microns.
Raw unfiltered honey, contains pollen that range from 2.5 to 1,000 microns. Most honey producers will filter the pollen out their honey with sieves that range from 50 microns (heavily filtered) to 600 microns (lightly filtered). But, as we know, Hunter Gatherer populations tend to eat a lot of honey and they didn’t filter their honey with modern sieves. So, I can imagine lots of large and small pollen getting persorbed by Hunter Gatherers every day.
Once I realized that, it occurred to me that it persorption probably wasn’t a design flaw in our bodies. Combine that with the practice of geophagy (eating dirts and clays) and you get the picture that these particles are probably supposed to temporarily roam through our blood vessels. Persorption appears to be an intentional mechanism with a purpose.
Raw meat is rich in glycans (glycolipids, glycoproteins, etc.), which is what we know of as animal fiber. Animal fiber is persorbed as well, and likely has a very wide range. Some of these glycans are probably used throughout the body. In fact, any fiber particle that is eaten from any food will surely become persorbed in the same manner.
Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) from blueberries literally get transported to your blood vessels and play a role in maintaining their health. Without persorption, there would be no way for GAGs to contribute to the health of blood vessels.
Beta-glucans (usually acquired from mushrooms), which are are considered to be “keys” that turn on the body’s macrophage defense (immune) system. David Wolfe describes how they work, like this:
David Wolfe said: “Specifically, here is how it works: the beta glucans found in [mushrooms], other herbs, foods, or supplements enter the body via the small intestine and are captured by the macrophages. To be activated by beta glucans, the macrophages must first “ingest” the beta glucans through specific beta glucan receptor sites on these cells’ membranes. Then the macrophages internalize and fragment the beta glucans within themselves and transport these fragments to the bone marrow (helping stimulate more stem cells) and to the reticuloendothelial system (RES). The beta glucans fragments are eventually released by the macrophages and taken up by other immune cells, including neutrophils , monocytes, natural killer cells, and dendritic cells, leading to numerous enhanced immune responses, 19 including adaptability against and deactivation of foreign pathogens, genotoxicity (toxins harmful to genetics), cancerous growth formations, and environmental toxicity.
According to a study that appeared in the Journal of Hematology and Oconology in 2009, “animals pretreated with purified glucan particles are subsequently more resistant to bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan challenge, reject antigenically incompatible grafts more rapidly and produce higher titers of serum antibodies to specific antigens.”
SOURCE: Wolfe, David (2012-09-11). Chaga: King of the Medicinal Mushrooms. North Atlantic Books.
When you put it all together, you can sort of see the big picture of what the body does with persorption. It selectively persorbs particles, perhaps based on their size, so that these particles can get exposed to the entire body and the immune system in a matter of minutes. And then the unneeded particles disappear — often filtered out by the liver or lymphatic system.
I suspect as long as you are eating quantities of particles that are within the range of normal human consumption, you are fine. The amount of RS that most people consume (5g to 40g) is within the normal limits that would have been eaten by Andean indians or even Asians consuming Dioscorea opposita (a tuber high in resistant starch granules). I don’t see how that could be especially problematic within the context of the naturally occurring persorption that we have always been exposed to.
The concern with persorption, if there is one, is likely from man made particles that the body may not be prepared to filter.

 

[managing]

Well it seems that we are in agreement. Thanks for clarifying your views. I agree that written words get taken out of context. I'm sorry if I came off that way. I took what you wrote as an indirect ad-hominem.

Don't you mean MORE CO2 breathed out? Hyperventilation is simply the loss of partial pressure of CO2 in the blood, leading to respiratory alkalosis. You can have mild respiratory alkalosis and not be ready to faint like if you force hyperventilate. When I refer to it being transiently desirable, I'm talking about a very mild form of hyperventilation leading to only a mild CO2 debt, just very deep breathing. Anything that causes your respiratory rate to increase (breath faster) will do this, and you are more likely to lose more CO2. Sprinting a 100m does this. All out sprinting is stressful. But it is a transient stress that can allow you to reach higher levels.

If you want to get good at sprints, you train at less than your maximum potential and build up to higher levels in weekly cycles. You don't sprint at 100% every day. This is a recipe to fry your CNS, and then you will not only plateau, you will likely regress. Strength training is the same way. The best way to train for strength is to have the bulk of your training cycles in the 70% range, give or take, well under what could be considered "heavy" and then a small amount of training in the 85%+ range. If you train at 85+% all the time, then as power lifters say, you are simply "testing your strength, not building it."

So all I am arguing is that one does need to train at high intensities SOMETIMES, in order to have an adaptive response and improve. And in training at high intensities, one may breathe fast/ heavy and cause excess lactate build-up. Most trainees never train intensely enough to see good progress, as evidenced by 90% of people you see in the gym. Other trainees go overboard and train with high intensity all the time, and either end up burnt out or injured. Only the genetic outliers survive. This was essentially how bulgarian training was formed, and why most people can't do it.

BTW, hyperventilation does not need to be extreme hyperventilation to be dangerous, people with COPD hyperventilate so subtly that it's barely noticeable, however they have chronic respiratory alkalosis. I work with people with COPD on a daily basis so I know first hand. It's not very obvious, and you often have to pay close attention to notice it. Obviously this is different than transient hyperventilation, and I'm not saying this to prove a point, but to expound on the fact that you don't need to be breathing so fast that you are to the point of fainting (i.e. the usual perception of what hyperventilation is) to be hyperventilating.

I still stand by my point that I don't think Ray emphasizes the benefits of transient stress enough. He talks about large muscles being important for health and survivability, but in order to build large muscles one needs to perform eccentric exercise. From a practicality standpoint, one can't build large muscles by "moving some light dumbbells very fast," or by "cycling up a hill and coasting down." Most research involves real-world resistance training, which involve eccentric movement, and anything that goes against this is as you would say, "an outlier." And as you pointed out, we don't use outliers to prove a theory.

Moving back to volek, I completely apologize, I did not mean volek, I meant volkheimer. I went back and dug up what I read about persorption of starch. It's not Volek, it's Volkheimer. I have been reading articles by Volek recently, so I simply confused the two. I have not actually read an article by Volek where he writes about gut permeability. Did you come across this? I'd be interested.

Anyway here is info regarding Volkheimer and starch persorption:
THE PHENOMENON OF PERSORPTION: PERSORPTION, DISSEMINATION, AND ELIMINATION OF MICROPARTICLES – Functional Performance Systems (FPS)

I find it important to read Volkheimer's work, because this is where Peat forms the basis of his arguments. I've read that there is gut persorption of many other foods, for example berries and other fruit cause persorption as well. So it's not just exclusively starch. I'll have to dig up the research that shows blueberries and other foods cause persorption. The authors basically stated that persorption is not a bad thing and that it's a normal process and helps the body become more resilient.

To clarify another point, my citation of sources regarding saturated fat and glucose with increased LPS was just to elaborate a point that other foods increase LPS in the bloodstream, not starch alone. Ray doesn't really discuss this much in his articles, but it's important to point out because there are complex mechanistic reasons why this happens. Those that promulgate that saturated fat is toxic use this link to suggest that eating saturated fat is bad for us, but a close examination reveals that the reason long-chain SFAs increase LPS is due to the transport of chylomicrons for long chain fats. The LPS increases to the degree of chain length, and doesn't happen in any appreciable amount in short and medium chain fatty acids. What I am saying is, just because some saturated fats increase LPS, doesn't mean saturated fat should be avoided. I also would further this by saying it would warrant further investigation into the starch and LPS link. I'm not convinced that starch increasing LPS is inherently a bad thing. And I don't believe there is enough research to convict starch just yet. If you know of any, please share it.

Yes, I stated the hyperventilation definition backwards.

As for Volek/Volkheimer, I remembered reading RP's statemnts about it and just took it for granted we were talking aobut Volek because that it what you said. So, we were just both misattributing it.

As for starch, I've always thought it an oversimplification in that starch won't necessarily ferment, and other things (most notably simple sugars like glucose, and, to a lesser degree, fructose) will ferment.

I actually suspect that its the gut irritant quality of starch that is more of a concern than fermentation or other microbial processing of the starch. If I remove the majority of starch from white rice or potatoes, they rarely bother me. But anything that irritates the intestines-uncooked garlic, undercooked vegetables, grains, high viscosity fats, etc--gives me a skin reaction and maybe a headache.

As for persorption, RP hasn't written anything about it that I can find. I do see a couple of youtube videos indexed as being him speaking about the subject, but I've not watched them and can't right now.

EDIT: Did find this quote from one of those vids: "Volkheimer found that mice fed raw starch aged at an abnormally fast rate, and when he dissected the starch-fed mice, he found a multitude of starch-grain-blocked arterioles in every organ, each of which caused the death of the cells that depended on the blood supplied by that arteriole. It isn’t hard to see how this would affect the functions of organs such as the brain and heart, even without considering the immunological and other implications of the presence of foreign particles randomly distributed through the tissue."

I wonder what cooking does to starch? And if it matters the medium (ie, rice cooked in water, potatoes baked or fried, or wheat hydrated and baked.)